Read this wonderful,
honest, impressive book with joy and admiration for Karen and her husband –
there are also a good many impressive colour photographs to pore over and
admire. Highly recommended by this lover of the bush and wildlife in Africa.
(Review by Dee Stead)
“In Hippos, A Mongoose And Me, the sequel to the popular A Hippo Love Story, Karen Paolillo takes us deeper into her courageous but perilous life among Africa’s wildlife.” Karen and Jean-Roger Paolillo have lived on the banks of the Turgwe River in southeast Zimbabwe for 30 years.
At first, they lived in a little canvas tented lean-to, with a tiny caravan for a kitchen, but later built, with their own hands and help from only one guide, a beautiful thatched brick-and-stone house. Here they have lived with their cats, and an abandoned new-born baby mongoose which they hand-reared and named Squiggle, surrounded by bush and wildlife with the Turgwe River and its resident hippo pods since the early 1990’s.
This book has been written as a series of stand-alone chapters, each chapter telling a separate story. As I read these vividly described events and memories, I was struck by the suitability of many of them for bedtime reading to children in the 5-10 age group. As an introduction to the natural world of the local wildlife, I cannot imagine a more thrilling and informative routine for a child to look forward to of an evening.
Throughout the crippling droughts in the 1990s when vegetation was sparse, water non-existent and annihilation of most of the animals practically a certainty, Karen organised haybales and other supplements to be transported vast distances to sustain the animals she had come to know, name and love.
Karen’s writing is uncomplicated and honest and although she has a strong tendency to anthropomorphize, which is usually frowned upon by the more scientifically-minded reader, the very fact that she gives particularly memorable animals names and describes their “characteristics,” behaviour and attitudes, makes her stories accessible and endearing.
Karen does not confine her narrative to tales of the “Big Animals,” one chapter deals with the “Very Small,” like scorpion and the violin spider. The effects of bites and stings from this spider and from the Parabuthus scorpion gave me chills, and I made a mental note to remember to check inside shoes, bedding and hanging jackets before donning them whenever we spend time in tented campsites!
I learned from her the value of keeping supplies of tea-tree oil and lavender oil essence for the treatment of cuts, blisters and stings, too. The stories cover encounters with leopards, baboons, elephants, crocodiles, the smaller ungulates and occasional lions and the ubiquitous poachers and bullying landgrabbers.
She is always positive but unjudgmental – leaving the readers to mull over her words in their own fashion. Of course, work like that of Karen and Jean-Roger cannot go on forever without funding. They established the Hippo Haven Turgwe Hippo Trust, a non-profit organisation, that can only survive on contributions to the fund from sympathetic and like-minded individuals and groups world-wide.
As a PR exercise, this book is perfect – the thread of the vital need for funding runs gently through the narrative and is very effective. Read this wonderful, honest, impressive book with joy and admiration for Karen and her husband – there are also a good many impressive colour photographs to pore over and admire. Highly recommended by this lover of the bush and wildlife in Africa. – Dee Stead
A Mongoose and Me is published by Penguin Random House South Africa: ISBN 9781779890016
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